The Pixar Movies, Ranked From Worst To Best

Talk about trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Cars 2 is an awkward mismatch of a movie that takes an already established, marketable franchise and drops a spy film into it, a genre Pixar probably would have been better off exploring in a brand new setting. The Cars world, in which vehicles are living, breathing people, is already a poor foundation for a spy story, which typically benefits from nimbleness of character and narrative, but to then put Mater, played by country-boy comic Larry the Cable Guy, at the center of it all makes the whole thing feel like a single joke stretched way beyond the point it stops being funny. In theory, this could have made Cars 2 work as a spoof of more serious spy films, injecting its least-likely hero into a story he’s categorically unfit for, but the film just doesn’t have the juice to meld these ideas together into a cohesive vision. When Cars 2 gets serious, it feels comical. When it’s trying to be funny, it hydroplanes into silly. Ultimately, it feels like a movie made to sell toy cars and little else. — Kenneth Shepard

The Good Dinosaur is probably Pixar’s most forgettable film. It’s not the hot mess that Cars 2 is, but it has pretty much come and gone without leaving so much as a cultural footprint. Despite being lost in the annals of the studio’s history, The Good Dinosaur is mostly fine. The survival story is surprisingly brutal to its co-protagonists, Arlo and Spot, a young dinosaur and caveman who go from enemies to friends as they try to make their way home after being swept up in a violent stream and separated from their families. As the two face the harsh elements of the film’s alternate-history world in which dinosaurs never went extinct, they form a close bond, one that takes some unexpectedly dark turns for a Pixar film. It’s fine. It probably didn’t deserve to be Pixar’s first box-office bomb. But it also felt like a turning point for the studio, which had, up to this point, created mostly certified bangers. — KS

Finding Dory had to prove that Ellen DeGeneres’ Dory, who was the surprise breakout star of the original Finding Nemo, could hold a film on her own, lest it instead demonstrate that her ditzy amnesiac personality worked best in a supporting role. For whatever it’s worth, the sequel is pretty successful in making Dory the star of her own story, and it turns out she can still deliver an hour and a half’s worth of laugh-out-loud bits and still find a truly profound conclusion waiting for her at the end of it all. The problem with Finding Dory is that its final act is such a chaotic, nonsensical, obnoxious culmination of everything the movie introduces that it can barely get a handle on itself by the time it slams its foot on the brakes and just kind of…stops. Pixar also can’t quite stick the landing here as it struggles to reconcile its secretly sentient aquatic world with a human one in which somehow the presence of sea creatures causing havoc and mayhem on the surface world doesn’t make headlines, and Finding Dory’s third act is one of the most damning examples of the studio having more ideas than it can concisely bring together in the end. — KS

Admittedly, I’m probably more charitable to Pixar’s attempt to make a “movie within a movie” than the average viewer, but Lightyear’s biggest problem isn’t that it’s not an interesting thought experiment in the Toy Story universe; it’s that it’s dreadfully dull. I do like the beginning and end of this movie. Chris Evans puts on his best not-Captain-America voice to give us a pretty great portrayal of a duty-bound space ranger who is so fixated on protecting people in the abstract that he forgets to care for flesh and blood people in his life. Lightyear begins with its titular hero repeatedly subjecting himself to a time-dilating space trip in an effort to help save a marooned space colony. He literally blinks his life away trying to fix one fuck up, and then faces a living manifestation of his obsession in the closing act. The beginning and end of Lightyear form a really tight full-circle moment that I found truly satisfying, and if all the stuff in the middle were half as compelling as the film’s foundations, it could have been one of the studio’s greats. Unfortunately, it’s not. Lightyear is surprisingly dreary, even when it has characters as likable as Keke Palmer’s spritely space ranger Izzy and the merchandise-ready robot cat Sox. As interesting as it is to see Pixar lean into a more serious tone with high stakes, Lightyear is almost entirely devoid of joy. — KS

Damn, we waited 14 years for that, huh? Incredibles 2 manages to recapture the original superhero film’s family dynamic to a T, and that’s an impressive feat after over a decade away. The trouble is the sequel’s story is nowhere near as strong as the original’s. Incredibles 2’s brainwashing villain, the Screenslaver, is the personification of a boomer telling you that “it’s ‘cause you always be on that damn phone” without a drop of irony. Yes, there’s some actual depth under the facade, but to come off a truly stellar modern classic in the superhero genre, one with complex familial relationships, nuanced political commentary, and some of the studio’s best character work, and release something that felt like so paint-by-numbers and curmudgeonly is one of Pixar’s most tragic falls from grace. — KS

When Brave premiered in 2012, it should have been a huge deal for Pixar. It was the first movie the studio released with a woman protagonist, and Princess Merida was the first (and thus far, only) time Pixar got to create an official Disney Princess. A big part of her premise was that she would be a subversion of the exaggerated perception that Disney Princesses were meek damsels waiting for a soldier to come save them. She didn’t need no man, could save herself, and wasn’t going to listen to her mother’s demands for her to fall in line and marry some halfwit dweeb whom she could easily outshoot…then she goes on a transformative adventure with her mother, and they find common ground. But not the kind that lets Merida continue to carve her own path. Instead, she concedes to her mother’s desires and agrees to follow a traditional path. What a waste. — KS

The third Cars movie feels like a more honest sequel to the original than the second one did. It gets back to the NASCAR-inspired roots that were the heart and soul of the first film, and instead of just cashing in on the love people have for Owen Wilson’s Lightning McQueen, it actually reckons with the often tragic end stages of being a professional athlete. Lightning is getting older, and at a certain point, you have to let go of your position at the top to make space for those you helped pave the way for. It’s still a pretty mid Pixar movie, as I don’t think even the best of these films manages to reach the highs of the team’s best work. But at least it had ideas beyond just riffing on the franchise’s bizarre premise of living cars. — KS

Soul is a tough movie to sum up and rank because, on paper, it’s great. In its story of protagonist Joe Gardner nearly dying and having to reckon with his belief in determinism, it has a lovely premise. Joe spent his whole life believing that he was meant to be a jazz musician, and was so steadfast in the notion that it was the reason he was put on the earth that he forgot to stop and smell the roses. It has things to say and is rooted in its protagonist’s life as a Black man, but trips up in its handling of some of these ideas. It falls into the unfortunate trend in animated movies of not letting people of color be the star without transforming them into some kind of animal or creature, and then for swaths of the film when we finally do see Joe on screen as himself instead of as a disembodied soul, his body has been overtaken by Tina Fey’s 22, so a white woman’s voice is coming out of his mouth. Soul stumbles on its way to saying something meaningful, and the victim is the same Black protagonist Pixar took decades to finally put in the lead. — KS

I don’t think Cars is a good movie. It’s more like a clever bit that Pixar stretched out into a two-hour feature film. Cars is mostly a long worldbuilding gag that dares to ask the question, “What would the world look like if vehicles were at the top of the food chain and were somehow able to create an entire civilization with infrastructure despite lacking opposable thumbs?” The strength of Cars is that it’s so earnestly committed to its wild premise that you eventually buy into its world of sentient cars without the movie having to look at the camera and explain to you how this is logistically possible. But is that a good film? Is there really much to this story of a cocky racecar getting citizen-arrested by a bunch of podunk hillbillies because he accidentally caused some property damage? It’s fine. The movie’s fine. Certainly wasn’t good enough to merit the multimedia franchise it became, but those toy cars aren’t going to sell themselves. — KS

Elemental is a classic example of Pixar having a strong core thesis that is too smothered by its overly clever setting to shine as brightly as it could. The film’s world of people made up of earth, wind, fire, and water is gorgeous to look at, clearly has a lot of thought put into the logistics of its pretty much segregated setting, and facilitates a pretty touching story of two people finding their way back to each other after societal pressures nearly tore them apart. Its leads, the fiery second-gen immigrant Ember and sentimental rich boy Wade, are star-crossed lovers whose struggles give rise to some pretty meaningful commentary on the xenophobic nature of our world, but Elemental spends so much time indulging in visual spectacle and world-building that it loses the plot. It’s an enjoyable film whose tale is sometimes frustratingly told, but I suppose that can sometimes happen when you dress up real-world issues in a world that is so detached from our own it requires several asides to explain how its society works. — KS

Onward is a mostly fine movie saved by a really excellent ending. Chris Pratt and Tom Holland playing the elven brother duo of Barley and Ian is the most 2020-ass casting Pixar could’ve concocted. They basically play themselves as they go on a magical road trip to try and complete a spell that will let them spend a day with their deceased father. Like many of Pixar’s movies, Onward spends a lot of time showcasing its original setting, but it’s a fun enough romp until its incredibly affecting ending in which Holland’s character realizes that he hasn’t been lacking a father figure because his big brother stepped the fuck up. It ends with a poignant moment in which Pratt’s character gets to speak briefly with his revived father before the spell wears off, but the audience is kept at a distance, unable to hear the words exchanged. That moment is for Barley, and Ian is our protagonist, so we’re stuck in his perspective. Onward denies the audience catharsis when it counts and for that, it gets a sizable bump on this list. — KS

If you made a list of “movies that don’t need to exist,” Toy Story 4 would belong near the top. But is it bad? Nah, it’s pretty good, to be honest. The most unnecessary film in Pixar’s catalog answers the question of why Annie Potts’ Bo Peep was missing from the stellar third film, and it allows Tom Hanks’s Woody to reflect a little more on what he wants out of life beyond his job of being a toy. This comes at the expense of pretty much every other old character in the film, but as a love story between two toys who were nearly separated by fate and a lack of work/life balance? It could have been worse. And it was a major box office success, so we’ll get a fifth one and continue to trample on Toy Story 3’s ending. Hurray. — KS

Pixar’s latest film is for the weird kids who hyperfixate. Elio’s story of an outcast child who has lost everyone who’s important to him and is seeking anyone, anywhere who might accept him, is the science fiction isekai every little kid wishing for friends imagines growing up. The titular orphan dreams of leaving Earth for the stars to find friends and family beyond this floating rock. Through a series of happy coincidences he manages to make his way to a galactic community that loves him, albeit under a guise of being Earth’s leader and representative, and his attempts to maintain the facade lead to some life-threatening antics. But as he finds his people in space, he grows to appreciate what he’s left behind. It’s a heartwarming story about a character who’s making the best of what he’s got, even as a child who has endured more than he should have had to at such a young age. — KS

Monsters University doesn’t hit as hard as the original, but it’s one of Pixar’s best straight-up comedies. The prequel landed while I was in college, and the barrage of nonstop hilarious university gags hit hard. That universal experience every college student has when they go to a school with big dreams makes the movie surprisingly timeless. Yeah, it’ll entertain kids, but the target audience feels like it’s actually college graduates who are distanced enough from the hazing and hokey school spirit to be able to laugh at it. It’s one of the most fun romps Pixar’s put on the big screen and is surprisingly underrated. — KS

Almost nothing in Inside Out 2 is as memorable as the best moments of the original. However, the franchise’s core concept of personifying every complex thought pattern the human brain experiences is still one of Pixar’s most interesting premises. Hence, it still had the juice for a sequel. Riley’s emotions are going into overdrive as she enters adolescence. Thus, her entire mindspace is changing with new characters, new personifications of thought, and ultimately an incredibly powerful representation of an anxiety attack within the visual language of these films. Like Toy Story 4, we probably didn’t need it, but it does well enough as a continuation of the original’s excellent concept. — KS

Pixar’s second film is often forgotten because its release was sandwiched between those of the first two Toy Story movies, but A Bug’s Life remains remarkably prescient nearly 30 years later. The film is a story of class issues, and a speech from villain Hopper (who’s unfortunately voiced by Kevin Spacey) about how the ants may be weak on their own, but when united, they would easily overthrow the grasshopper gang is still a remarkably succinct reminder that while the ruling class may hold power, the working class could rise up and seize it for themselves. A Bug’s Life was pretty beloved at the time, but it feels even more important now. While it’s not considered Pixar’s most foundational work, it’s easily one of its most profound. — KS

Toy Story 2 had quite the legacy to live up to after the original film launched to universal praise, but the sequel delivered, riffing on the initial premise of “what if toys were sentient” by exploring new dreams, horrors, and heartbreak for the toys that we love as children but leave behind as we grow up. It’s particularly impressive how well Toy Story 2 ended up coming together considering its reported development woes, but Pixar managed to pull it off. — KS

I think the best Pixar movies are the ones that take a simple concept and dig in to create something both unique and memorable. Monsters, Inc. is a great example of this type of Pixar flick. Most kids have experienced the terror of thinking, no, believing, that a monster is hiding in their closet or living under their bed. Monsters, Inc. goes, “Yeah, there were monsters in your closet, and they live in their own world and use closet doors as magical portals to show up, scare you, and suck a bit of your energy away in the process to keep their TVs and cars running.” It’s such a great idea that it would have worked with any actors voicing the main characters of Mike and Sully. But Pixar brought in the always great John Goodman and equally talented Billy Crystal to bring these two monster pals to life in what is both a workplace comedy and a weird sci-fi comedy romp. It really only misses the top 10 because Pixar has made so many great films that really good movies can still land in the middle of the pack. - Zack Zwiezen

The original Toy Story isn’t just important and foundational within Pixar’s catalog; it’s one of the most important movies in animation history. Looking back on it after 30 years, the film is surprisingly dark. The life and times of a toy on the verge of being forgotten are kind of harrowing when you think about it. Toy Story manages to expertly blend genres of comedy, horror, and drama, all within a premise that was incredibly novel in 1995. It was such a successful execution that it informed decades of Pixar’s output. The lessons the studio learned here haven’t worked out every time, but Toy Story paved the way for the next three decades of animation both in and out of Pixar, and even if it doesn’t look as mind-blowing as it once did, it still holds up pretty damn well. — KS

Turning Red feels like Pixar’s second shot at exploring themes it first broached with Brave, but without the same stumbles that made the 2012 film fall short. The movie stars a teenage Chinese-Canadian girl named Mei who discovers that once they reach puberty, members of her family are cursed to turn into giant, mystical red pandas when they have giant bursts of emotion. When your relationship with your mother is already tense enough for all the normal reasons teenagers go through, adding something as disruptive as an uncontrollable transformation into a giant fluffball is only going to make things more challenging. Turning Red succeeds in exploring these tumultous child/parent relationships because its underlying message isn’t “do what your parents tell you”; rather, it explores the fact that even the most perfectionist of parents are still growing and trying to figure things out themselves. Mei’s mother is dealing with her own traumas while trying her best to help her daughter not make the same mistakes she did, and the film wisely recognizes that no parent or child is beyond learning something new from the other. — KS

If Luca had been released theatrically rather than shoved onto Disney+ during the height of the covid-19 pandemic, I still don’t think it would have been the cultural event some of Pixar’s best films have been. It’s an understated story of friendship and being true to yourself whose main characters happen to be sea monsters who just want to be like everyone else. Even with that sea monster element, Luca is one of the most human stories Pixar’s written. It isn’t so fixated on the elaborate worldbuilding that often bogs down the studio’s stories, and instead its more focused fantasy elements are an extension of its characters’ humanity, rather than a constant distraction that pulls us away from the story it wants to tell. Luca represents one of Pixar’s most effective uses of an otherworldly element to talk about the real world. Sure, it’s no Incredibles-level epic or Coco-level tearjerker, but it is one of Pixar’s most consistently heartwarming works. It’s also pretty cool that Pixar artist Kenna Jean Harris gave us unsanctioned fan art confirming we weren’t all crazy for believing Luca and Alberto would grow up to be more than friends. — KS

A rat that controls a person by hiding under their chef’s hat and pulling their hair. That’s a weird concept for a film. Even weirder, the rat is smart and loves cooking, despite his fellow brethren being trash-eating animals. And even weirder, this all comes together to deliver one of Pixar’s best original films. The idea that anyone can cook, that anyone can do more than they think, is a nice message that is threaded throughout the film. If you love food and cooking, you need to find some time to watch Ratatouille. If you like movies that deal with critics, yeah, watch this flick. And if you like Patton Oswalt, who voices the main rat Remy, you should watch this movie, too. Really, everyone should watch Ratatouille. — ZZ

If we were just ranking openings, Up would not only be at the top of this list, it would probably rank pretty high in a list of best film openings of the 21st century. Up is a kind of messy film to try and sum up because it has so many disparate elements that, out of context, sound like they’re coming from multiple unrelated films rather than a singular cohesive work. But its opening, in which we watch married couple Carl and Ellie grow old together, could be a short film on its own. Ellie’s passing is the spark that ignites her husband’s grief-driven adventure to move their marital home, by way of thousands of balloons, to the remote Paradise Falls waterfall in South America, and the screenplay provides a masterclass in what it means for a character to “haunt the narrative.” The minutiae of how Carl treks toward his destination are entertaining and gave us some of the most memorable characters in Pixar history, like the speaking golden retriever Dug, so we can forgive it being a bit messy en route to its powerful finale in which Carl, with Ellie’s posthumous blessing, is able to move forward and past their old dreams. Ah, fuck, I got choked up thinking about it. Anyway, Up good. — KS

When you open a movie with a fish losing all but one child to a barracuda attack, you immediately set the stakes for that baby fish’s safety. And when Nemo, the sole survivor of the attack, is captured by scuba divers, his father Marlin ends up going on an ocean-spanning journey to find his son and bring him home. Finding Nemo manages to weave Marlin’s trauma into a story that somehow manages to be an absolute hoot while never diminishing what the guy has been through. Marlin plays the straight man to some of Pixar’s most iconic characters, many of whom have had a long-lasting impact, such as the amnesiac Dory, who would go on to get her own movie 13 years later, Bruce the pacifist(?) shark, and Crush, the surfer dude turtle who helps them along the way. Meanwhile, Nemo is taken under the fin by several other captive fish in a dentist’s office, and they’re all tied up in their own trauma after being captured themselves. Finding Nemo is a story of fish people trying to make the most of the life they’ve been given while also being desperate to hold onto it by any means necessary. But as Marlin comes to learn, if you love something, you let it go. It will come back if you stop holding on so hard. — KS

You can’t say “Take her to the moon for me” to most Pixar fans without them either falling to their knees and sobbing or shoving you away and telling you to shut the fuck up. Inside Out’s emotionally devastating moments are among the most memorable in Pixar’s portfolio, but the film also arguably marks Pixar’s most clever and effective use of the “secret life of X” formula that it’s been utilizing since the original Toy Story. The 2015 film follows a cast of “emotions” inside a young girl’s head who are doing the best they can to help her navigate this beautiful, sometimes miserable thing we call life. If you were to cut out all of the segments following the emotions, you’d still get an emotionally earnest story of a child struggling with the world around her. But what makes Inside Out so good is how it has a visual concept for just about every dumb thought and struggle we have in our heads. Imagination Land is a dumping ground for every creative or silly daydream you’ve ever had, your train of thought is a literal locomotive, and when you forget something, it disappears into a void, never to be seen again. Inside Out is full of so many brilliant nods like this that it somehow manages to build an incredible sense of place inside the human brain. — KS

The higher we get on this list, the more I realize that the best movies in Pixar’s line-up have some major tearjerker moments. There probably isn’t one quite as well-known as Toy Story 3’s finale, but even if we didn’t all collectively lose it watching Woody, Buzz, and the rest of their toy pals nearly accept their death as they went down an incinerator, Toy Story 3 is still an incredible film that tugs at the heartstrings of all the kids who grew up alongside Andy and his toys. Pushing aside Toy Story 4’s existence with all our might, Toy Story 3 was a perfect closer to the story Pixar began in the ‘90s. Andy has grown up, and all his childhood toys are locked up in storage. Everyone who has ever formed an overly sentimental attachment to a toy knows what it’s like to finally get rid of them or store them somewhere out of sight. Yeah, you feel like you’re too grown up for them, but those are your childhood memories given tangible form. To store them means that the carefree era in your life is over, and maybe another kid could love those toys the way you did. Letting go of that childlike bliss is never easy, and when Toy Story 3 premiered in 2010, a lot of long-time fans who’d grown up with the films were now old enough to be dealing with this same inner struggle. For those of us in that group, it was gut-wrenching to watch, and for that same reason, it was a perfect ending. If only it actually had been the conclusion. — KS

It’s been 17 years since Pixar released its post-apocalyptic romance film, and WALL-E feels more apt than ever. The movie’s titular little robot hero starts the movie wandering a desecrated Earth and trying to clean up the mess humanity left behind. Humans have completely abandoned the planet as it became uninhabitable for all the reasons environmentalists are still warning us about today. Corporate interests are prioritized over the health of the planet, and eventually, that will catch up to all of us who aren’t even benefiting from it in the short term. WALL-E’s spacefaring robot romance is full of adorable moments and humorous takes on the apocalypse and is still gorgeous to look at nearly 20 years later, but perhaps what keeps it resonating after all this time is the knowledge that we are still barreling toward its dystopian future. But at the center of its story is a hope that not all is lost, and that is a message that carries just as much weight. — KS

When I saw Coco in a theater, at the very end, I looked around and saw everyone tearing up and crying. Kids, adults, elderly people, that weirdo with two sodas for himself. Everyone was crying at a quiet moment between a young boy and his grandma. A moment where, thanks to music and surviving an otherworldly adventure through the afterlife, that boy is able to connect to his grandma one more time and make her smile. He sings her a song that was always meant for her, from someone she loved a lot. It proves that Pixar, more than most other studios, understands that a good family movie doesn’t have to be fart jokes and pop songs. Instead, you can tell a truly heartwarming story about a young Mexican boy trying to find his place in the world and landing back at home happier than ever, with a family who now understands him better. And if you do it well enough, people will cry while two totally CG characters interact. — ZZ

In 2025, Marvel is finally making an MCU Fantastic Four film. It looks cool. But nothing will beat the best Fantastic Four movie ever made: The Incredbiles. In fact, this 2004 animated adventure about a family of superheroes hiding their powers and then working together to save the day might just be one of the best comic book movies ever made. And ironically, it’s not based on an actual comic book.

There are a lot of reasons The Incredibles works so well. It has a unique art style that blends the vibes of golden age superheroes with a retro-futuristic world. It tells a story that, for all its twists and turns, is incredibly (see what I did there…) relatable. Bob Parr, the movie’s knock-off Superman, is struggling with his age and feeling like he’s stuck in a rut. Meanwhile, his children are struggling with their powers while also dealing with all the problems that come with growing up. And finally, Helen Parr—who has the ability to stretch—is trying to keep everything together while wondering if Bob has found someone new and more exciting.

Keep in mind, this is a movie primarily designed for kids and families about colorful superheroes. So Pixar and director Brad Bird have to very carefully balance how much they lean into these themes while still keeping things mostly lighthearted and fun. Somehow, they pulled it off. The end result? The Incredibles is not only Pixar’s best movie, but one of the best Disney movies ever made, and arguably a true classic that will be talked about and watched decades from now. Oh, and Disney: Please don’t do a live-action remake. Please. — ZZ